Niche Publishers Crush Newsletter Engagement Levels

A top surprise from the NPB’s 2025 Newsletter Audience and Revenue Survey was how well niche media newsletters performed compared to  newsletters across the board.

In short, the 42 niche publishers in the sample were not just ahead of industry averages for newsletter engagement; they crushed the numbers.

Why this is important

To set the stage, first let’s take a quick look at the viewpoint of marketers who control large digital budgets.

They always knew that newsletters outperformed even programmatic banner ads. The data has been there for years.

Pre-2015 DoubleClick data showed an average CTR of just 0.05% for all display formats — just 5 clicks per 10,000 impressions (Smart Insights), and even DoubleClick and Google’s most recent data showed banner ad CTR of  .19 to .46%.

That is already 4x less than email CTR’s  – about 2% across the board for newsletters in all industries (Hubspot).

However, most large marketers used programmatic tools that made targeted banner ads easy to buy and stuck to big buys that combined branding with click traffic. That is, until last year.

As U.S. search referral traffic dropped 38%  YOY in November 2025,  advertisers began to demand results, that is, clicks to their websites to replace organic search traffic.

The chart below shows the drama clients were experiencing on their own websites:

A shift in marketing spend toward email, predicted by the Press Gazette among others, soon panned out.

In a matter of months, even large marketers shifted budgets from massive buys of cheap but less engaged banner ad traffic into email sponsorships, which surpassed programmatic as the dominant share of all banner ads for the first time in recent history by the end of 2025 (Digiday).  Big media with large email lists began to segment lists to deliver higher response rates from smaller buys. 

Not to get too far into the weeds, here, but another important reason for the new focus on CTR’s is that Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection made open rates less reliable by automatically preloading email content. Apple Mail accounts for 46% of email clients, so this skewed open rate data upward by about 18 points – roughly 200%, from around 20 to around 40%.

Media sellers do need to know this stat because many of the most sophisticated advertisers who are likely to understand the results-first value proposition already do.  If you say the open rate is 40%, they’ll just cut it in half. They now prioritize CTR, click-to-open rates, and conversion metrics over open rates alone (HubSpot).

The shift of focus to results immediately gave a leg up to niche publishers with smaller, higher-performing email lists.

Niche Media in the Cat Bird’s Seat

Niche media websites are already “pre-targetted” and their newsletters “pre-segmented,” in general. So they are in a key position to take advantage of the  “results-first” marketing trend.

Most niche publishers in the survey also had substantial (>10,000) email lists and sold ads in their newsletters.

However, they are just starting to optimize ad units, pricing, and focus heavily on list building. 80% said they plan to grow both email audiences and revenues this year.

Before the AI shift, the newsletter was often seen as promotional  – that is, driving traffic to the website where most of the ad revenue was sold- rather than as a core revenue opportunity in itself.

This is not to diminish banner ad sales, especially high-engagement units that combine with newsletter ads from companies like Broadstreet Ads – but rather to point out an opportunity for both publishers and their advertisers.

As James Cridland, owner of newsletter-first PodNews.net put it in an interview,  why sell against a tiny fractional click-through-rate, when 100%  of the most engaged audience is already reading the newsletter itself?

The Survey

In late 2025, NichePublisher.biz (NPB) set out to survey publishers to see how their engagement rates  – read, results for advertisers – compared to Hubspot’s report, what story direct traffic percentages told, and other key metrics.

As niche audience search traffic fell off, how much direct traffic could they rely on? Were niche publishers also segmenting email? Could they be under-charging? Would CTR’s from niche newsletters make an even stronger case to marketers?

That’s where it got really interesting.

Niche publishers had 300% + higher average CTR’s (think results for advertisers)

Data reported by 42 niche publishers surveyed (after culling anomalies we could not confirm) in late 2025 showed that niche newsletters in the sample had an average CTR of 7.2%, compared to the industry average of 2%.

Even if you account for IT department Bots clicking on links, and understand that the 7.2% average may not be “real clicks”, it is still 3x higher than other newsletters that have the same problem with bots clicking, creating a largely apples-to-apples comparison.

That also means that a well-crafted message in a targeted newsletter can produce 3x the number of clicks as the advertiser’s own newsletter, in addition to reaching an additional super-engaged and targeted audience that the advertiser does not have.

Next week’s report looks at how well niche media newsletters in the sample did in covering their market.

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